


blacksmith, whitesmith

by deniigiq



Series: finding the lost verse + [1]
Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Din is absolutely the Armorers favorite and there has to be a reason for it, Foundlings, Gen, Genderfluid Character, I'm just saying guys, Parent-Child Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-17 12:34:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28849146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: A Whitesmith vanished into the sand—into the wastes of Nevarro.An Armorer emerged from the burning coals of the forge.They had a foundling.(Din Djarin is the Armorer's foundling.)
Relationships: The Armorer (The Mandalorian TV) & Din Djarin
Series: finding the lost verse + [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2192382
Comments: 14
Kudos: 449





	blacksmith, whitesmith

**Author's Note:**

> Din is the Armorer's foundling. No, no. Speak naught. You can't convince me otherwise. 
> 
> Also, I refuse to accept that Din was 8-10yo when he was taken in by the Mandos. No, no. (Dis) respectfully, fuck off Disney. If you won't give me a decent backstory for these two, I'll write my own and you'll rue the day.

The child was small and underfed. It refused food despite the attempts of those who had found it. These people were used to this. They told the Whitesmith that this behavior was not unusual for the little ones in their care.

Having witnessed what they had before arriving to the refuge, children like this one were prone to stomach cramps that they could not explain, to bedwetting and lashing out and screaming and sobbing and refusing to sleep or fully awaken.

The nurses said that this child was fairing okay so far, although he declined to speak and to eat.

He did not scream. He hadn’t when he’d been taken.

He did not cry. He hadn’t when he’d been taken.

He was simply small and underfed and silent.

The Whitesmith asked who his finder was and was given the name of a Mandalorian who she did not know—who was, it was her understanding, one of the Death Watch.

She’d looked down upon the child’s silent, dark head and had then crouched down to his level.

She asked him how old he was. He looked at her quizzically and reached out to touch the lines of gold that she’d set into her helmet.

“He’s five years old, from Aq Vetina,” the nurse beside them said. “He does not speak Mando’a.”

“What happened to your mother, little one?” The Whitesmith asked.

She did not stop the hand tracing her lines of gold.

“She has perished,” the nurse said. “The father as well. The village is in poor condition. They cannot assure his maintenance.”

The child had dark brown eyes and hair that wisped into curls all over his forehead. He had tan skin.

“May I see this?” The Whitesmith asked, finally taking ahold of the hand feeling along her visor.

The child did not resist. She took his other hand and let go of them in front of him.

“Go like this,” she instructed, pinching her thumb and middle finger around her wrist as far as they would go. They did not meet. They never would.

She repeated the motion. The nurse started to translate for the child, but he caught on before she finished the second word.

Slowly he held up a wrist and placed his other fingers around it.

They did not touch, despite his smallness. Despite his being underfed.

The Whitesmith was leaving today, but she was not leaving without this child.

His name was Din. Din Djarin.

It suited him. He hummed while he held onto her fingers. He swung her hand a little bit later on, when he was less confused and afraid of the world around him. But then, he’d only held it.

He could not tell her if he was really five years old or if he was four or six or none of those options at all, but he was small and he was warm and he was very, _very_ tired.

He fell asleep in her arms on the ship. The Armorer did not approve, but the Whitesmith had not asked for his approval. 

The Armorer told her to put the child, the foundling Din, somewhere more secure, but she refused.

There was nowhere more secure than where he was right now.

The Whitesmith was twenty five years old, and this was her foundling. Her first foundling.

Din was still not interested in eating in the first days that he arrived to the new base on Nevarro. It was not a permanent base, so the Whitesmith was hesitant in using the word ‘home’ for it--not that Din would know that word anyways.

He gave no words to the place, the same way that he gave no words to himself or the Whitesmith or any of the caregivers back at the nursery.

He gave no words to any of it, but when the Whitesmith left him in the arms of a nurse for the first time there, so that she could follow the Armorer towards a potential future forge, he gave a few distressed breaths and held hands out to her.

The Whitesmith did not want to leave him.

The Armorer told her that she should have thought of that before bringing him all the way to Nevarro.

When she arrived back to the new base after three days spent returning from an unsuitable space, she thought that the ultimate comfort would be a wash and a bed which was not laid on sand.

She didn’t realize that it instead might be found in a child.

Din had been well-looked after but had remained distressed the whole period of her absence, his nurse said. He wanted the Whitesmith to pick him up. The nurse told him that he was too big to be held like a baby, but he could not understand her and the Whitesmith found that she did not care if he was or wasn’t too big.

She stooped and lifted and settled her foundling on her hip. He wrapped his arms around her neck and hid his face against the side of it. And then he started to cry.

It took only a month before Din told her his name. She’d been practicing with him, trying to remind him how to use his vocal cords, promising him that nothing bad would happen if he made a sound.

He was terrified of bots. This, she quickly learned and the one that moved jerkily around as a cleaning aid was promptly banned from her quarters.

No droids, she promised Din, smoothing hair back from his face. Never droids.

He said his name shortly after that.

Then he tried to name other things around the base, but the Whitesmith did not know his dialect. He stared up at her emptily when she did not respond to his curt, choppy words appropriately. He misunderstood and took it upon himself to try to teach her the words that she did not know. He took her hand and set it upon his head and said, “Din.”

She nodded and said, “Din,” and then he would move her hand onto something else—the bed, her helmet, the wall—and would tell her the word for this in his language.

She could only shake her head and then remove her hand from his grasp. She gathered him close and showed him the same things and gave him the word in Mando’a. Once, twice. As many times as it took for him to repeat it back to her.

Each time, she rewarded him with a “good.”

Good job.

Good work.

Well done.

You’re so good, Din.

He didn’t know his numbers. He didn’t know how old he was. There was no confirming anywhere, so the Whitesmith told him that he was six now. Six.

This many fingers. This is ‘six.’

“Today we will mark the day of your birth,” she said.

He didn’t understand. It was too many words together. He showed her six. He said ‘resol.’ That was plenty for now.

Din was seven (This is ‘seven.’ E’tad is seven. Seven is this many.) when he was officially declared unable to be repatriated to his people. He was a true foundling now. The Whitesmith’s foundling. And he was taken from her to join the others in being trained to become a Mandalorian.

He was taken from Nevarro. He didn’t cry, though. And he knew all his numbers and all his letters. He knew his name and he knew that he was seven.

Seven.

The Whitesmith received reports of her foundling during his training. She received word from the couple who were looking after him. They spoke of him fondly. They asked her if they could adopt him.

She said no. She didn’t know why, but she said no.

Din Djarin did not need more parents; he needed something that would outlast them.

The couple were disappointed.

The Whitesmith itched and itched and itched.

The Armorer refused to make the armor. The Death Watch told him that he had no choice. He refused anyways.

They killed him.

And the Whitesmith raised her helmet and made a decision.

She killed them.

She walked out of the forge and left that helmet behind.

Din was nine years old when she stepped into his room in the rearing couple’s dwelling and told him that it was time to go. He didn’t recognize her. He was afraid.

She crouched down and took his hands and measured his wrists with her own.

He knew her then.

He wrapped his arms around her neck and hid away from her face.

“Come,” she told him, “Let’s get out of here.”

She told him to say good bye to the couple. They asked her where she was going. They offered to keep Din for her until he was of age.

But no.

No more. For the Whitesmith or her foundling.

There were others on Nevarro. A group of them, disorganized but committed. They spoke of an ancient way. They spoke of a commitment from Mandalorian to Mandalorian—a Creed in which bodies acted as part of a whole.

To kill one’s own over a hatred of peace or war was not to be heard of among those people.

The Whitesmith had taken on the foundling Din Djarin and she would not raise him to be cannon fodder for someone else’s war. She would not build armor for someone else’s war.

She refused to let either of their fates be forged in these fires that were not their own.

So she lifted her foundling up onto the steps of a ship she had no intention of bringing back this way and told him that he ought to get some sleep.

There was much work to be done soon.

Din was one of eight foundlings when the Whitesmith let him hop off the ship. He wanted to hold her hand. He was too big for that, and too old, but the others there were bigger and older, so she let him hide behind her when they were introduced.

He was the youngest by two years.

The next up was a boy named Paz, also human. Above him by a year was a young person named Jhuvac. Then, barely old enough to be wearing their armor was a set of twins and another human boy with dark skin and waves upon waves of thick curly black hair. The oldest were two newly helmeted youths called Sotra and Eegang.

The children pried Din’s hand from the Whitesmith’s and took him away to their new, shared quarters.

He didn’t cry. He only looked over his shoulder at her and then away, confused.

He was frightened of her face, still. He didn’t know it. He only knew the helmet.

She had to get another.

She knew what it would look like this time. She would make it herself, by the sweat of her own brow and the blisters of her hands.

But first, she had to get the metal.

Only one kind would do.

Beskar was tricky. It needed to be heated to a higher temperature than any other metal. It had to be poured just right so that there were no distortions, no bubbles, no graininess, nothing.

But before you could work with beskar, you had to find it.

And to find beskar you had to _work_.

The Whitesmith barely had time for her foundling. There was a forge to be built. There were tunnels to be dug. Piping and scaffolding to be placed. There were jobs that had to be taken to feed the covert.

There was work.

There was work.

There was so much work.

And then one day there was a forge. There were tunnels that would not collapse. Above and below ground space to stand in. Places to sleep, places to eat, places to cook and bathe and study and train.

There were more of them. More foundlings; twelve. Din wasn’t the youngest anymore, but the new children were babes, barely out of arms.

And then one day, the the covert lost a member.

A Whitesmith vanished into the sand—into the wastes of Nevarro.

An Armorer emerged from the burning coals of the forge.

They had a foundling.

Their foundling took his oath at twelve years old and laid his hands on the Armorer’s helmet. He couldn’t trace the gold lines as he had seven years ago; there was nothing but gold now. Gold over beskar.

“I’m going to teach you,” the Armorer told their foundling, “And you will be the best of them all. Do you understand, Din?”

He wrapped his arms around their neck. They gathered him into their arms while he was still small enough for them to do so.

“You will be the best,” they said.

Din’s helmet was beskar. Din’s armor was red. Din asked no questions and took no prisoners.

There were new foundlings. Eleven now. He was no longer among their ranks as children. He worked as hard for them as a whitesmith once had for him. One day, the Armorer looked up and realized that it was his twentieth year. Seemingly the next, it was his thirtieth.

There had been four foundlings since Din. Four foundlings that the Armorer called their own.

They all called the Armorer different things, things that no longer mattered the way that they had when the Whitesmith had first gone away.

She found that she could be ‘she’ in the forge.

They could be ‘they’ in the forge.

He could be ‘he’ in the forge.

These things did not matter, all that did was the Creed, the children, and the armor.

Din mattered, too, but Din was never at the covert these days. He was off in the Above, hunting, flying.

He counted his age no longer. He refused no job. He lost as many fights as he won, but never did he lay in the dirt, in the sand, in the fire. He stood. Or he walked or he crawled and he came home.

The Armorer saw his helmet and saw a warrior, of whom they were proud. Who she, that Whitesmith with gold lines in her helmet, could no longer pity.

But at the same time, that solid, unpainted helmet made the Armorer feel in their hands soft small ones. They could feel the weight and heat of a silent, underfed child in their lap—in their arms--on the long ride to Nevarro for the very first time.

Din Djarin was the Armorer’s foundling.

And now he had a foundling of his own.

**Author's Note:**

> in case you aren't aware, a whitesmith is someone who does the finishing work on metals or who works with light-colored metals (silver, tin, etc.)


End file.
